


Only Time

by halotolerant



Category: Historical Farm (UK TV)
Genre: First Kiss, Friends to Lovers, Historians, M/M, Making Out, Period-Typical Homophobia, Sexual Tension, Time Shenanigans, Time Travel, Tudor Era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-16
Updated: 2018-12-24
Packaged: 2019-09-20 10:37:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 16,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17021085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halotolerant/pseuds/halotolerant
Summary: “And I’m not there, Ron!” Alex came to the side of Ron’s chair, crouching down to meet his gaze eye to eye. “This finally happens to them and I wasn’t there, I’m not there, I have to be there, I can’t leave them again. I can’t just sit around and read the folder and do nothing.”For the first time, he saw some of his own distress dawn in Ron’s eyes.“Wait, you mean… You can’t mean...? You want…? You want to join them?”





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [subito](https://archiveofourown.org/users/subito/gifts).



> Yes the title is from an Enya song. I regret nothing.
> 
> Hi subito & Merry Yuletide, I hope this is something that you enjoy, thanks for a great prompt in a fandom I love 
> 
> Thanks also due to my dear beta. Remaining mistakes are my own. 
> 
> **Disclaimer** I know this story seems like a DEEPLY LIKELY PREMISE but in fact nothing in it ever happened, I know barely anything about these people and much of what I do know I've ignored/retconned/altered. Any resemblance to anything (probably including accurate Tudor farming practices) is random good fortune.

That the stuffed owl on the shelf was very much alive only became apparent when it blinked at him. Blinked slowly, and with an air of being underwhelmed.

 

Alex had been shifting his weight nervously from one foot to the other. He moved again now – this caused one of the floorboards somewhere under the Turkish carpets to squeak loudly, making him jump and the owl screech so loudly that Alex almost fell over backwards, tripping over a footstool covered in the component parts of a pocket watch.

 

His heart had already been pounding. In the midst of an unfolding disaster, one did not expect anything that came suddenly to be pleasant.  

 

“Come now Caratacus, don’t scare the poor archaeologist.” Looking to the doorway, Alex saw Ron coming back into the room, a laden tray in his hands.

 

Professor Ronald Hutton was apparently unconcerned by the many trip hazards littering his floor. Globes, books, astrolabes, sacking bags bulging with…something, chunks of rock crystal and a glazed pottery bowl of a dark liquid were just some of what had been crammed onto the carpet. But then this was his study, perhaps he was used to it – certainly he stepped around the various detritus deftly enough, depositing the tray on a low table with the cups intact and the tea still in the teapot.

 

“Burdock leaf,” Ron said happily, gesturing Alex to sit down in the armchair opposite him. “Added to the dried product of the _camellia sinensis_ a few moments before the infusion is to be completed, it can produce great calm at times of agitation.”

 

He looked at Alex’s knee. Alex made himself stop bouncing it and let himself be served his cup. A few minutes, he could wait a few minutes, and he certainly couldn’t _shout how important this was, you fool_ , because if Ron didn’t agree to help him now Alex would have nothing… have nowhere left to turn…

 

“Now my boy,” Ron said – and _he_ certainly didn’t need to get any calmer, he still sounded like a person who’d been sitting all day in a sunbeam with just enough ale for merriment, as if Alex’s unheralded arrival hadn’t troubled him at all. “Explain it all to me again, and more slowly this time.”

 

Alex, cradling his cup, made himself take one deep, steadying, readying breath.

 

“It’s happened,” he said. “What you warned us about all those years ago, back in Wales.”

He had to stop and brace himself before saying the words. There was a hot chill in the centre of his stomach, the insides of him falling away.

 

“Transchronolocation. I mean, it has to be! I mean…that is to say: They’ve gone.”

 

Ron blinked at him, looking not unlike the owl had, and sipped his own tea before replying.

 

“Now Alex, first off, demonstrating an instance of transchronolocation is usually, as it were, post-hoc…”

 

“But he’s gone!”

 

Alex cleared his throat, made himself take another steadying breath – reasonable enough that Ron would want proof.

 

“They’re all gone, Ron. Vanished from the under the production team’s noses. They’ve been gone a while – far too long! I told you already, when I went to the team today they said they’ve not seen them in nearly three weeks now! Three weeks! Their presenters all just vanish off the face of the Earth during filming and they just…”

 

“And what did the producer say to you about that?”

 

Alex made a sound of disgust. “What do you think? I heard the all contents of that stupid bloody ‘emergency planning’ folder – don’t worry, it happens, wait it out, think of the opportunity for in-person historical observations, yadda yadda – I helped Ruth type that thing up, from your notes I might add, I know how flimsy the evidence for all those assertions is! The few well-documented cases of transchronolocation…”

 

“…by and large returned entirely comfortably and safely, having greatly enjoyed the rare happenstance of relocation in time, and within a month of their first disappearance.” Ron was smiling a little, damn him, _gently._ “And if you recall, one of the known cases of transchronolocation on record happened to our friend Ruth – she’ll know what’s what, even if the other two don’t.”

 

“I’d bloody say they don’t!” Alex hadn’t meant to stand up, but somehow it had happened and now he was pacing. “It’s Tom’s first time out, I don’t know if they briefed him properly about this, and Peter – since when did Peter ever read the manual?”

 

Ron reached over the table and picked up Alex’s discarded cup, setting it back carefully on its saucer. “I appreciate your concern. For those of us in the historical community, the risk of relocation in time is something of a, uh, sword of Damocles, and it’s disconcerting to realise it can occur to anyone. But occur it does, and your friends have only been gone within the usual range of days.”

 

He looked up at Alex and smiled. As if he couldn’t picture it at all, all the ways a person could get hurt in the past. One ill-chosen look in a public house and you could be stabbed – or forget _doing_ anything, a set of nice clean, good quality BBC historical garments were probably worth a pretty penny in any era, worth a quick mugging. Then there was plague, of course, and sweating sickness, and the bloody flux and _leprosy…_

 

“Listen, Alex,” Ron was continuing, oblivious, “I’m glad to reassure you of this, but if I may say so, I still don’t understand why this had you running to my door in the middle of the night. If you went to the filming site at the Weald and Downland today to check on them then you must have come all the way to me from Sussex? It must have taken you hours. And why did you go all the way there?”

 

“You don’t….” Alex made himself breathe again. He wished he hadn’t tried the tea. It sat sloshing and sickly in his stomach. “What’s important is that anything could be happening to them!”

 

A tabby cat emerged from the doorway and leapt into Ron’s lap. The image of domestic calm and contentment, in the face of Alex’s own anxiety, was starting to make him angrier than he could contain.

 

“And I’m not there, Ron!” Alex came to the side of Ron’s chair, crouching down to meet his gaze eye to eye. “This finally happens to them and I wasn’t there, I’m not there, I have to be _there_ , I can’t leave them again. I can’t just sit around and read the folder and do nothing.”

 

For the first time, he saw some of his own distress dawn in Ron’s eyes.

 

“Wait, you mean… You can’t mean...? You want…? You want to _join_ them?”

 

Alex stared back, wide-eyed as the owl, and nodded.

 

-

 

In a valley in Monmouthshire, South East Wales, in a 2005 that was aiming to imitate about 1620, Ronald and Ruth had briefed the rest of the _Tales from the Green Valley_ team about transchronolocation. Stuart, long-time worker at the site, had been well aware of the risks, and the farm there already had an action plan to follow in the event of it happening, but for Alex, Peter and Chloe – who, one cold night in, was already somewhat regretting her involvement – it was entirely new information.

 

“Not surprising you’ve not come across it, not as archaeologists - not such a risk in that field,” Ruth had explained to them. “That’s the thinking, anyway. Very distanced, you dig up, you don’t use. ‘Course, safest thing is book history. Unless you’ve got an incredibly good imagination or tend to handle artefacts more than most. Re-enactors, that’s a decent risk, but it depends how much you’re inhabiting a character. Studies have found that if you’re role-playing, you’re about three times less likely to relocate than if you’re just you, in the past, but you. That’s our risk here.”

 

“Risk?” Peter had murmured in Alex’s ear. They were sitting crammed on the kitchen bench together, it was the end of the evening meal and Peter had found a great affection for the farm’s home-brewed ale already. “I mean why call it a risk? Imagine being here, really being here! Really being then! I’d be stuck here very happily.”

 

Alex had been thinking the exact same thing, and knowing that Peter would know that, had felt quite at liberty to adopt a mocking posture. “Well sunshine, you will be, as of tomorrow. No hot water, no indoor toilet and no electric light.”

 

“A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse — and Thou,” Peter had murmured, or something like it, but he’d already been in the process of dozing off.

 

And so Peter had slept with his head on Alex’s shoulder, and Alex had listened to the rest of transchronolocation, followed thereafter by ‘What If I Saw A Limb Off?’ and ‘Things That Mean the Sheep Are Definitely Ill’.

 

-

 

Getting back from Ron’s house to the Weald and Downland living museum in West Sussex took an inordinate amount of time, which was far more to do with the Great Western Railway than any supernatural or paranormal influence.

 

Nonetheless, Alex was conscious of ever-growing apprehension – mostly Ron’s fault, since he would look so worried about it.

 

“But you can do it, right?” Alex had pressed him the evening before, whilst they were still at Ron’s house, Ron refusing to even consider setting out until, in his words, Alex had had some time to ‘rest and reconsider this’. “You can send me to them? Like you told me about with the trip when you visited the witches’ coven in 1322?”

 

The length of time, and the caveats around which Ron had tried to put his ‘No’ had only further convinced Alex that he meant ‘Yes’.

 

And so, after an uneasy night in Ron’s spare bed in which he expected the arrival of the owl hourly, Alex had woken Ron at six in the morning with a coffee and no lessening of determination. They had set off for the various trains to Chichester within the hour, Alex increasingly frantic with every delay the signals, overhead power lines and level crossings could cause.

 

Ron met each new obstacle with a look of hopefulness, as if the Deity (or whichever combination or manifestation of them Ron believed in) might be intervening.

 

Ron didn’t want to do it. Ron wasn’t really allowed to do it. Ron didn’t think it was a good idea to do it. Ron was afraid to do it. But he _could._

 

He could send Alex to the rest of the team.

 

And just now that was all Alex cared about.

 

“They were enacting a precise year,” Alex reminded Ron again, under his breath in deference to everyone else on the bus from the station to the living museum. “That can help you find them, can’t it?”

 

“Perhaps. But it could be any season of the year, you could miss them by months!”

 

“But the relocation usually happens in parallel with the season of the year you leave from – that’s what you told us.”

 

“Usually is not always! It might be October with them, it might not be. And it might not be 1495. There was a case in a colonial recreation in America where the historian ended up in an undateable pre-Columbus era and had to hide for all their fifteen day sojourn lest they greatly upset the timeline or indeed unleash their minor cold on the populace potentially hundreds of years before the Mayflower colonists would do the same” Ron’s hiss had become quite loud by the end of this speech, and the woman in the seat behind them sighed loudly and put in some earbuds, thumbing at her phone.

 

“But I’m perfectly well.”

 

Ron raised an eyebrow at him as though he had some points for debate on that topic.

 

Alex looked out of the window. The bus stopped, people slowly got off and others slowly got on. An elderly lady had misplaced her bus pass and began searching in her bag. A teenager had a pre-payment app on their phone, only it was out of charge so they couldn’t use it, and they were outraged the bus driver wouldn’t simply believe them about this.

 

Ridiculous to be so worried about delays when it came to time travel. But Alex was only human, and he forgave himself for feeling as though it mattered, as though every second wasted here was another second the team spent unaided, spent not knowing that when he’d bowed out for this year’s filming he’d still… obviously he’d still do anything for them, _obviously_ if a crisis happened he’d come.

 

When they got off the bus and were making their way to the museum gates, Ron took his arm and drew him aside.

 

“You did understand when I told you that you may not be able to get back? I can send you in the slipstream of their exit, as it were, but that doesn’t mean you’ll be sucked back when they are. And purposeful time travel is far less well understood than the accidental kind. They might come back and you might stay. Maybe even for the rest of your life! They won’t thank you for doing that to them. They won’t thank me either.”

 

Alex did pause, staring almost unseeing at a great clump of blown thistle.

 

But… If the situation was reversed. If it had been Peter who had had to leave the team to work more fully in academia for a year. If it was Alex lost in the past, and Peter here, waiting…

 

Peter wouldn’t be waiting. Peter would be there by now.

 

“Listen, Alex.” Ron paused, and sighed. “Please think about this clearly. I know that you’re very fond of them all. That maybe…”

 

“I’m not discussing this, I’m going.” And, setting his shoulders back, Alex started once more walking towards the museum.

 

After a moment he heard Ron following behind.

 

-

 

There’d been a five-year gap between _Green Valley_ and _Victorian Farm_ , and it was apparent from the outset that the new show was a bit of a different beast. More money, more guests, more ambitious projects, due to be shown in the evenings not in the daytime.

 

With more investment came more corporate concerns about risks and insurance. Transchronolocation was clearly rather an embarrassment of an entry on the likelihood/impact risk matrix that the finance department had drawn up, but nonetheless there it was, and everyone had to sign that they understood it.

 

Alex had been more concerned about how he, Ruth and Peter would all pick up again together, after the gap. It could be like that, after all – people who got close on a shared project, promised to stay in touch, reunited and then found they couldn’t figure out why they’d ever wanted to see each other.

 

But from the first meetings when Ruth had hugged him, offered to make him a tallow salve for his hands and demanded a blow-by-blow account of his latest thatching experiments, he’d known it was going to be fine.

 

Peter he’d seen a bit more of anyway, despite the gap in professional work, and Peter had seen more of Ruth, gregarious as he was. But there was a big difference between bumping into someone at conferences, going for the odd drink at the pub, and one excursion to the cinema for a re-run of _Akenfield_ , and living more or less in their pocket.

 

But, “Can you believe this is our job?” Peter had asked him, gleeful, as they’d started in on costume choices and the ‘Things That Mean the Sheep Are Definitely Ill’ refresher. “We get to spend a whole year hanging out together and get paid for it?”

 

Later, it had started to seem like a habit, like something that was always to be. That the three of them would get a farm every year and a chance to do all their favourite things, year in year out, for all the time in the world.

 

-

 

The gadget Ron removed from his haversack defied Alex’s understanding. It was something like a compass, but also something more like an hourglass, but that did not account for all the cogs and valves.

 

“If anyone asks, you never saw me with this,” Ron said warily, catching him staring. “It’s not supposed to have been invented yet.”

 

Alex blinked, and decided to address that whole situation at another time.

 

Opening his knapsack, he got out the Tudor clothes he’d had sitting about since _A Tudor Feast for Christmas_ had been filmed back in 2006. They were none the more pleasant for six odd years in a bag, but the cream jerkin, terracotta knee breeches and green statute cap were good enough at short notice. Plenty of Tudor people smelled a bit ripe anyway, he was sure, whatever Ruth said about alternative hygiene practices.

 

He had a cloth bag with some high energy bars inside – with the wrappers stripped off they’d look unfamiliar but hopefully not completely anachronistic nor create any paradoxes, and a drawstring purse with a small number of genuine early Tudor groats that Ruth had given him one Christmas as part of complicated joke.

 

It was simple enough to change behind a tree – chilly though, in the early October air – and when he came back, Ron had stepped away from tinkering with the machine and seemed ready for him.

 

As Alex came over, Ron sighed, arms crossed in front of him. “I can only say, again, that I really do not advise this.”

 

Alex started to answer, but Ron held up a hand and kept speaking. “You do know it’s not your fault? That they’re gone? This would have happened with or without you.”

 

“But it was without me, Ron! That’s what matters right now!”

 

“They told me you had to write your book. That seems reasonable enough to me, and absolutely was to them, by all accounts.”

 

Alex bit his lip. He didn’t want to delay another second, but… “They talked to you. About me?”

 

“Briefly. As it were with a non-issue. I really don’t think you need to worry. Believe me, they’re not sitting there expecting you to come.”

 

“Don’t you see how that makes it worse?” It was Alex’s turn to hold up his hand, interrupting. “No, I don’t want to talk any more. I want to go. Please, Ron, let me go to them.”

 

In the pause and the cold air, Alex could hear a child somewhere distantly else in the museum crying inconsolably, the start of the day out and already distressed.

 

Ron folded his arms, breathed out noisily. He looked from Alex to the machine, from the machine to Alex.

 

He gestured Alex to stand in a spot he’d demarcated with a few twigs and an old biro. Then he started adjusting the machine once more, and put his hand to what looked like a guard on the mechanism, apparently about to release it.

 

Then, he stopped again.

 

“Alex, I do implore you,” he began. “I’m still not sure you really have thought through…”

 

Quick and sharp – you didn’t learn to catch chickens and not get nimble – Alex darted in and took off the guard himself. Instantly, the machine started to move, whirring mechanically.

 

“Alex!” Ron was yelling, but he was already fading away.

 

And then, everything changed.


	2. Chapter 2

Heat; that was his first, sudden impression.

 

Hard, sunshine heat so unlike the misty October he’d left behind that Alex was in a sweat at once.

 

Alex blinked, finding himself instinctively holding a hand up to shield his eyes from the glare. The sun was high in the sky here, near noon, which was a few hours wrong at least, but nothing in comparison to what had happened to the seasons. Alex hadn’t had time to research what was known of the weather patterns in 1495, but he was confident no Tudor October had been this hot.

 

If this was 1495. If this even was the fifteenth century.

 

Alex looked about him.

 

In terms of three-dimensional space he had not slipped anywhere out of place at all. He still stood in the green meadow behind a large yeoman farmhouse and barn. Ron, understandably, was nowhere to be seen.

 

And Alex couldn’t see anyone else.

 

It was quiet. The countryside of West Sussex had hardly been Piccadilly Circus even in the twenty-first century, but this now had a quality of deep, steady quiet Alex had never encountered before. No aeroplanes. No traffic, not even at a distance. Perhaps the absence of electricity pylons removed some ever present, tinnitic hum one didn’t notice until it was gone.

 

For half a second he was struck by it, really quite moved. He couldn’t wait to tell Peter…

 

_Peter._

 

He swallowed hard, looking about him again. Well, quite clearly he was in the wrong month, and all Ron’s warnings about grossly mis-shooting the year seemed rather different now that he was on the other side of them.

 

This could be 1395. 1295. Pre-Conquest. He could be waiting all the rest of his life here, if the slipstream of the others truly would be necessary to get him back.

 

But with any task, no matter if it was weaving a skep beehive from rushes or making a drystone wall or thatching or threshing or rescuing someone from a time slip, one began with the first step.

 

Setting his shoulders straight, sack still in hand, Alex set off towards the collection of roofs that might make the centre of a large village or small market town. The buildings were not generally arranged as he had last seen them – many structures at the Weald and Downland had been reassembled there, having travelled from their original sites for conservation. That meant even fewer points of reference.

 

The first reassurance – showing that he was, more or less, in the Tudor era – came as soon as another traveller joined the road, the man wearing almost definitely the right sort of doublet and appropriate, close fitting hose. This was not 55BC, in any case, nor was it was 1855.

 

But what help was it Alex being in the right period, if Peter – and Ruth, and Tom – had gone somewhere unexpected?

 

But one step at a time. One foot in front of the other.

 

What else could he do?

 

Strange, to trudge along a road hundreds of years before his decisions had happened, and have them with him all the same.

 

-

 

“It’s not that I mean to split us all up,” Alex said. “I really like doing it, there wasn’t anything wrong.”

 

They were in a restaurant in central London, all three of them. Alex had laid the ground via email, but this was the first time he’d stated it outright and to their faces: he wasn’t going to be in the next season. Whatever happened on _Tudor Monastery Farm_ , he wasn’t going to be there to find out.

 

“I need to give the academic work more time, if I’m to publish,” he continued. “I’m not like you, Ruth, I can’t sit down for half an hour a week with a notebook and have something coherent and interesting by the end of it.”

 

She smiled sympathetically. “I know you’ve been worrying about your writing, Alex. And if this is what you feel you need…”

 

“I have!” Alex had been increasingly unsettled over the past year or so, and surely if he got some tangible output for his career, that would help? At his age, it had to be normal to feel a bit jumpy, a bit like something was wrong, or unfulfilled? And given that he loved his work and lived where he wanted and did what he wanted, most of the time, that only left his career as the source – and solution – to that feeling.

 

“Bear in mind, it is the Tudors next, or so they say,” Peter pointed out. He was fiddling with a little paper sachet of brown sugar, turning it over in his hands. His fingernails, as ever, had mud under them. “I know you didn’t love the 1940s, all that petrol. But this is fifteenth century, it could be like Wales again!”

 

“It’s not about that,” Alex sighed. “Yes, the 1940s wasn’t the most fun but I had a good time. I just…”

 

He had to change something. He had gone to bed so often in the past year feeling like the day had been unproductive, like there was something he should have done and had missed. Something almost aching, a horrible cold need.

 

And yes, it hadn’t helped that he’d been put to tractors not horses and had to chart the period of British agriculture when everything that was now wrong in the world had begun, or for that matter that it had rained like stink. But changing all of that wouldn’t be enough.

 

“It’s not about any of those things,” he said again. “I just need to take a shot at this. I need to,” he shrugged, searching for words. “I need to live in the real world for a while, I suppose? I can’t… I feel like I’m hiding?”

 

Peter smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “Well of course, whatever you need. I’m just going to miss you, that’s all.” He cleared his throat. “Who’ll bring me dry socks? You’ll have to clue Tom into what I’m like.”

 

That allowed them all to laugh, just a little. Ruth changed the subject to some gossip about the world of popular history book publishing, and that was that.

 

-

 

The road into the town, such as it was, was dusty in the heat and dotted with animal dung in various stages of desiccation. Alex was surprised at the amount of seemingly random waste lining it – generally, it was accepted that until the consumer era of the twentieth century people threw minimal amounts away, and anything that was scrapped would be seized upon by others, less fortunate. But the roads here were fairly lined with debris.

 

He supposed he ought to take some notes, when he could, although he was hard pressed to imagine how this could ever be peer-reviewed.

 

Which made it little different than anything he’d else he’d done in the past twelve months.

 

That was the irony, wasn’t it? After all that ceremony about taking a year out to really get down to his writing, he’d found himself pausing more and more often to try out the things he was reading about. He had any number of wicker baskets, thatched hovels, whittled pegs and home-made remedies in the house now, and still less than three thousand words of text.

 

And when he tried those things out, succeed or fail, he’d found himself always turning, instinctively, to talk about it to Peter.

 

He’d sort of forgotten, when he’d planned the year, the difference him leaving the team would make to the amount they saw each other. It had become so usual, living in neighbouring rooms, working the same fields, pursuing the same projects. For so long they’d rarely been parted, and being together had been so normal that small times alone were simply a pleasant change, without any need to figure out how to make a conscious connection.

 

Parted! If he’d only known then, when Peter – and Ruth, and Tom of course – were only a few hours down the motorway, how much worse it could get!

 

He’d sent texts, at first. That had seemed like a thing people did. But Peter was, at best, a patchy correspondent (if that man could own a mobile charger for six months without losing it, Alex had yet to see it). Writing email seemed too much the province of work. Writing letters, affected.

 

He’d gone, in the end, to try and see them in person because he’d heard so little for so long he’d started to worry that Peter had in fact lost his entire phone and might need help claiming on a new one.

 

That had been the reason. That had been a reason that had seemed to just about justify the journey…

 

By the time Alex had reached the centre of what did seem to be a small town – marked with a stone cross at the meeting of the roads north-south and east-west - he was aware that several passers-by had made a double-take at the sight of him.

 

The worst-case scenario was that the time travel had in some quite literal way marked him out to ‘local’ eyes. But Ron, quick to warn, would surely have mentioned that? No, more likely it was his clothes, which as he had suspected were nicer than anyone else had, even vaguely stained from the feast preparation special as they were.

 

He was also taller than most of the other men – not something he was used to – and not wearing a sword, which for an apparently wealthy man was probably even more confusing.

 

A stranger in any place would be a natural focus of suspicion at this time – whatever part of the Tudor period this was, a threat of insurrection couldn’t be more than five years away in either direction. And all the more so if that stranger was, for example, staring at each of the stallholders carefully, scanning the crowd as if in search of a very particular something or someone.

 

In search of, and not finding. Not amongst the market stall owners, not amongst their customers. Not in the inn, where he sat with a measure of ale in a filthy mug that did very little for his thirst, and ate an energy bar surreptitiously from behind his sleeve.

 

Not in the small street of craftsman’s shops. Not in the church or its surroundings. Not passing on the roads to the stone cross, even though he sat at the base of it and waited till the sun was nearly setting.

 

Which was not to say they were nowhere to be found. They might be at an outlying farm. Or might have landed near the local abbey, if they’d not found a home elsewhere, or gone there if one – or more – of them had become ill…

 

Or, and it was perhaps truly the most logical suggestion, he’d arrived months too early or at least a year too late, and Peter, Ruth and Tom were not here yet, or had been and gone.

 

He was in the past, wondrously, miraculously in the past, living and breathing it, and all he could feel was deep, bone-deep fear that once again he’d misused his time.

 

Right, one foot in front of the other, that was all he could do – so what year was it? That would be somewhere to start, even if he didn’t actually know for certain where – when – they’d gone.

 

The year, however, was surprisingly difficult to establish. It wasn’t written anywhere – why would it be? In an era before newspapers, before even the establishment of the printing press in any major sense, noting the year would matter mostly for parish record keeping and transactions of the mighty, neither of which he had access to.

 

He could guesstimate, perhaps, by asking someone when they were born and trying to judge their age? “Did the Battle of Bosworth happen yet, and if so when?” seemed likely to lead to trouble.

 

The contents of the knapsack would keep him from starvation for several days if he rationed himself, but he might well be waiting here for months and clearly it was going to be hard to work out for how many.

 

_Or the rest of your life_ , Ron’s voice suggested, which Alex stamped on.

 

He got up from the crossroads and made his way back into the inn.

 

“Good sir,” he began, approaching the proprietor, hoping against hope that his accent was not stranger than ‘not from around these parts’ would cover. “I find myself in this town without occupation. Where might a man here make an honest wage?”

 

The landlord gave him a confused and measuring look.

 

“I have no trade,” Alex confessed – yes, he’d dabbled with any number of skills for the programs, and was not without some talent by modern standards, but ‘knows more about thatching than average person in 2013’ would not get him far in an era of experts. He was a handy enough labourer, he’d reckon, but not by Tudor standards, not day in day out, and he had no tools with which to pursue a craft even if he’d been prepared to try a bit of carpentry or stone masonry.

 

“I was born on the Continent,” he hazarded, hoping the landlord would have only the vaguest sense of that being Far Away and Different. As it was, he didn’t just now fancy taking a life or death quiz on remembering what European nation states where he might have been born had existed in thirty-five years ago from whatever this year was. “And my birth was such that I learnt no useful skills. I had money, for a while, but fate turned against me and now, as you see, have only myself.”

 

“Have you no friends that might take you in?” A lady – the landlord’s wife – leant in, looking a fair mixture of genuine concern for a stranger’s wellbeing and vague disquiet that this might be a lead in to a request for charity.

 

“I lost my friends,” Alex told her, and gulped.

 

The woman sighed. She was rubbing the inside of a pottery mug with a bit of cloth. Her teeth were remarkably good, in amongst the general state of oral hygiene Alex had noted so far, and this made him think she was not without attention to detail.

 

“Perchance the abbey is still seeking help with their gardens?” She prodded the man – if it was not her husband, they were certainly on intimate enough terms. “Here now, take this man out and tell him how he may get to the Abbey and ask them.” She turned back to Alex, smiling. “You have no fear of bees?”

 

-

 

Tudor history had never been Alex’s forte, and of course he’d not been involved in the Tudor Farm project. He was nonetheless fairly sure that in most abbeys the role he was now fulfilling would have been undertaken by a monk or lay brother, rather than gifted to an itinerant stranger in clothes with suspiciously resilient dye.

 

That said, it emerged that there was a polite fiction at Sussex Abbey that all the gardening was actually done by Brother Ignatius. Whereas as Alex soon discovered, Ignatius’ self-appointed part of the process seemed to be donning a straw hat and going to sleep under the apple trees with a bundle of bread and cheese. He was very old, and apparently well liked, and Alex gathered that an assistant for him from within the brethren was felt to be too much an accusation regarding his own lack of labour. Alex had been, in this way, apparently the answer to a rather specific prayer.

 

The name Alexander, redolent of foreign places, seemed to help excuse him some of his oddities, and since he was quite obviously a newcomer to the life in the abbey his lack of knowledge on when and where to attend services, eat, drink, pray, be silent and otherwise fall into the Rule of St Benedict were fairly well tolerated. The hours he had spent idling away winter evenings in Wales and Shropshire and Devon with Ruth teaching him bits of pre-Reformation Latin now came into their own.

 

And when it came to the garden – which was where he spent most of his time – he was able to speak mostly the truth to his talents. The herbs - for healing, for scenting the finest candles and the Abbot’s bedlinen. The bees - thrumming away in their skeps, building up their gold. The flowers - grown to the glory of God. He felt he did a reasonable job by them all.

 

And so the summer began to pass, jewel-bright as the cloissoné cover of a book of hours. Perhaps the strangest thing was how much it was familiar, the hours in the sunshine, undressing by a rushlight, privies in the ground, hard bread, cold hands and the scent of earth under his nails.

 

All things he associated with Peter.

 

The days were calm and fragrant and warm, and utterly miserable.

 

He’d never been a praying man. He’d always felt that if any force had made the earth and sky, that force would be fairly unimpressed with anything a human had to say about it all.

 

But hours of every one of his days were spent in the chapel, unavoidably, and in the echoes of the plain chant, he knew what request he wanted to be carried to the heavens

-

 

There was a lot of time to think, at the Abbey. That being of course somewhat the point.

 

Alex sat in the garden in the sunshine, in the sunset, in the twilight, in the rain. And the memories grew up around him like the grass, and like the bees they stung him.

 

-

 

One rainy day towards the end of the twelve months in the Green Valley, Alex and Peter had come inside to keep their clothes from getting sodden for the third or fourth time in a morning that kept fluctuating with a tease of sun. The decision was taken for Stuart to do a piece to camera about rain, since none of them seemed likely to get a chance to demonstrate anything else.

 

That meant a bit of a squash in the room, making space for the various lights and booms the crew needed. Stuart talked, and Peter and Alex were to sit in a corner. Peter was darning one of his shirts. Despite Ruth’s best efforts it was grey around the collar and cuffs in a phenomenon of casual dirt that seemed peculiar to Peter’s existence. Somehow, Alex had reflected, one would never have been surprised to discover any part of Peter covered in jam.

 

Alex had sat down to grease his shoes, looking at the things in his hands and not where he was heading, and had thus ended up more or less in Peter’s lap. Peter laughed happily and for a moment had thrown his arms round Alex’s waist, helping him avoid tipping onto the floor in the confusion.

 

That evening, gathering at the fire, just the team, Peter had grinned at Alex and patted his knee.

 

It was obviously a joke, so Alex had laughed again, and made a crack about if Peter wanted a hot water bottle he’d better visit the pigs, who might object less to him. And then everyone laughed, Peter included, and that had been that.

 

-

 

“What if it was always like this?” Alex had asked.

 

They were in the shepherd’s hut at Acton Scott farm, in 2009 and 1850, waiting on the lambs being born, playing chess out of a paper puzzle, drinking over-brewed tea and eating apples and slightly anachronistic chocolate digestives. (As Peter put it, the fact that it had taken human society nearly one hundred years from inventing the digestive biscuit to first thinking to put chocolate on it was clearly spatio-temporal glitch, and not one they ought to suffer for in the cause of accuracy).

 

Looking up from the board, Peter had smiled at him, and then cast his eyes over their setting as if replaying Alex’s words. The hut door was open to the warming spring air, the stars pricking the sky with light, the steady, guttural commentary of the sheep and their young, the harsh mating bark of a fox.

 

They had two bunks, plenty of blankets, a frying pan and a kettle. Alex had been entirely ready for Peter to have forgotten spare socks – as indeed had happened – and had ample for them both.

 

“It is pretty nice isn’t it?” Peter smiled again. “What about another biscuit?”

 

His eyes were warm in the soft lamplight, his lips red from drinking hot tea and chewing over chess.

 

“Pretty nice” Alex echoed, wondering why he felt suddenly rather sad, and looked away to reach for the biscuit tin. “You’d better not have sneaked any of these whilst I nipped outside, Peter.”

 

-

 

In Devon, 2010 and about 1909, and a dark night by a lime kiln. Toxic vapours, the sheer drop of the kiln edge and the snaking cables connecting massive television spotlights to their portable batteries made a perfect storm of hazards never seen before or hopefully since.

 

Then the moonshine alcohol had come into it.

 

Peter hadn’t been in danger, not really – any vaguely competent human would have finished stumbling over the cables well within the several metres to the pit edge, and he wasn’t drunk, just merry.

 

Nonetheless Alex had grabbed him, fast and hard and with a rising panic in the back of his brain. The urge to stop him, save him, was unsatisfied and kept going, making Alex want to drag Peter back to the portacabin the crew had set up and put a rug around him and check and check that he was definitely there, safe. Maybe make him some tea.

 

“I’m alright,” Peter had said, laughing a little. They’d fallen somehow to the ground together, and the grass was damp, cold seeping into Alex’s trousers. The film crew’s lights, besides being such an infernal trip hazard, made night vision non-existent; Alex could barely see Peter’s face.

 

“You’re alright?” Alex repeated, stupidly. Somewhere behind them, someone was trying to get the cameraman awake, annoyed the drama of the fall hadn’t been on tape.

 

“I’m alright, Alex.” Peter said softly. Then, laughing. “You’ll get your money back, I promise you! I dunno, what some people won’t do to make sure on a loan repayment!”

 

Around them, laughter.

 

Alex had let go.

 

-

 

In Hampshire, in 2012 and 1939 through ’45, Alex could no longer ignore the strangeness he was starting to feel.

 

This farm was different. They lived on site, as ever, but attempting to go full era-compliant (even with the odd escape to a shower) was a bit pointless for the 1940s, having little enough difference from modern times. Toothpaste might be more likely to be powder in a china pot than in a tube, and farm hands might have lacked indoor toilets, but this was a world of duvets and radio sets, nylons and bathtubs, tractors and milking machines and holiday snaps.

 

Peter had always been the one, of the two of them, who was happier with tech. He liked a machine – any chance to get absolutely covered in engine oil – and approached everything new with the same happy interest.

 

It was an older world that they had made together, and Alex missed it.

 

Then, towards the end of the year, with the harvest coming up, someone had suggested padding out the piece about a ‘land girl’ rat catcher coming to the farm with a need to give the woman accommodation.

 

“These farmers would still have been in touch with the old skills,” Peter pointed out, when a suggestion about corrugated iron had been made. “They would, or their fathers would, definitely.”

 

And then, when it was pointed out that there wouldn’t be time to make a hovel right from scratch – the one in Wales had taken weeks, Peter had frowned and gone to his room, returning with a bound collection of _LIFE_ magazine, the premiere photojournalism of the time.

 

He opened it to an article (‘Our farmers fighting on!’) featuring a building made of a straw.

 

“Looks nice enough,” Alex agreed, starting to imagine the thatching principles already – something quick, something easily available. Lay gads, perhaps? And then bundles of something..?

 

Peter nodded, then frowned again. “Actually I think we’d be more hospitable than just building her somewhere. No, I’m not disagreeing, I think we should build it, and then I’ll sleep there and she can have my room. As it were.”

 

“We wouldn’t have a room each, as it was,” Alex pointed out idly. He was mostly thinking about the growth cycle of stinging nettles. “Theoretically we’ve already got the evacuees in. Assuming that in this scenario neither of us is married to Ruth then I reckon we’d be sharing a room already. So we’d have to both move to the straw hut. Listen, I think nettles really would work and binding them won’t take a moment…”

 

The team loved that, and so it was decided. A central item for the episode: Alex and Peter build a house out of straw.

 

“I knew a little pig who tried this,” Peter had joked, hefting bales about. “Did not end well for the poor guy.”

 

They’d put the thing together, just the two of them and their muscle; natural materials turned to an efficient and elegant process. It was the happiest Alex had been with the farm work in a while.

 

“How much bedding, do you reckon?” Peter asked him, as they stepped back to admire their efforts. “Blanket underneath to keep the mattress stuffing from prickling through might be enough – it’s warm today.”

 

“You want to actually sleep here?” Alex was surprised.

 

“Well, I thought you wanted to.” There was something about Peter’s expression that Alex couldn’t read. “I mean, you were saying that you were missing living in-era and so if we do this…”

 

“It’s not like living in a straw house is in-era 1940s!” Alex had protested, starting to laugh. Of course it wasn’t. The 1940s was a time when everyone had been yearning for indoor plumbing, central heating, gas boilers and electric light.

 

Although probably, even then, there had been those who dreamed in another direction. People trying to find another world, building small versions of it together.

 

“That said,” Alex began, but Peter was already walking away, waving his hand.

 

“Never mind,” Peter called over his shoulder. “I really need to answer some emails anyway. I mean people are used to me being weeks late, but months really might be pushing it a bit, eh?”

 

And Alex? Alex had felt something horrible, something wanting and angry and terribly uncertain. He couldn’t pin it down, he couldn’t analyse it, there weren’t maps or guides or step-by-step drawings for what he was trying to unpick.

 

That was when it had occurred to him, for the first time, to just stop. To leave. To try and get away from… whatever this feeling was.

 

-

 

Toiling in the abbey garden, treading his paths to and from the different beds of flowers and herbs, to and from the chapel, the refectory, the dormitory, Alex found his thoughts also tracing over and over the same paths.

 

He’d wanted to leave the team, and then so, so desperately to find them all again, and whichever direction he’d been travelling in this feeling had pursued him. This terrible mixture of fear and dissatisfaction, of grasping after something he couldn’t see and wasn’t sure of.

 

And now he had time – too much time – to think, and not enough time to do anything. His tasks allowed his mind to wander – it was only with the bees, sometimes, that he could begin to forget his situation, and that he still hadn’t found them. But he was still required to spend most of every day inside the Abbey walls. He could only check on any new arrivals in the town around the noon hour, and did so regularly enough that he was teased for a having a sweetheart amongst the marketwomen.

 

His back had been aching for what felt like his entire life. He would have traded away a day’s worth of food for two paracetamol.

 

The days started to shorten, and with them the hours, and so with it the time to search. He had been at the monastery, by the count he’d started keeping on a stick of wood in the toolbox, nearly one hundred days. He still had no idea of year, other than it was after 1487 – he’d been treated to a recitation of a moderately risqué satirical poem about the Pretender Lambert Simnel one day at the market – and still before 1502, as he’d heard Prince Arthur mentioned as the heir to Henry’s throne.

 

It might be barely forty years till the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Some of those he dined and slept and prayed alongside would be thrown out on their ears then, and what would happen to them? What had happened to them, the dispossessed brothers? Why hadn’t he read up on that, before?

 

Alex had a photograph, somewhere on his phone, somewhere and _somewhen_ so far from here, of himself standing on the green grass that by 2006 would long have lined what was now the great nave of the Sussex Abbey chapel.

 

You could be certain of things, and also completely wrong about them. That was what he thought sometimes, staring into the darkness above his bed, in the still and the silence of the night.

 

And then he’d find himself thinking, again, inevitably, of the past – or was it the future? The memories he had of things yet to occur (he could distract himself a while on the four-dimensional logic here).

 

He thought, a lot, about Peter.

 

-

 

It was well after Michaelmas that the colder weather truly set in.

 

Brother Ignatius caught a chill and Alex’s chores redoubled since Ignatius spent most of his time in the infirmary actually awake and therefore giving orders. He had a passion to grow roses and Alex began spending a great deal of time around the stables, shovelling manure into wheelbarrows.

 

It was when he was there, in the abbey stableyard, reflecting on the very great boon that Industrial Revolution cheap steel had been to the world of spades, and also that these horses were clearly eating far too many green apples, that he heard his name called.

 

“It’ll have to wait a minute,” to said, not looking up.

 

It was the second voice being female that made him startle.

 

“Alex?” she asked.

 

“Alex?” By the time Peter spoke, Alex had turned fully around.

  
And there they were.

 

In the stableyard, standing on the rain-slick cobbles, looking about them but mostly at him. Three of them, all dressed up.

 

Tom still with his BBC microphone.

 

Evidently, they had only just been relocated.

 

“Alex?” Peter asked again, and stumbled towards him, and drew him into a great, warm, earth-smelling hug. “You came to visit! But what have you done? This is amazing, the extras, all of it! How did this happen? Come on, come to the trailer and get a cup of tea.”

 

Alex could only stare at him.

 

It was Ruth who, having looked the place up and down, and stared at the sky, cleared her throat and said, “Unfortunately Peter, I don’t think that’s going to be possible.”


	3. Chapter 3

“But Alex, I still don’t understand! What were you thinking?”

 

Peter was keeping his voice down – barely. The words, hissed out, exasperated, sounded so unlike Peter’s usual steady tones that Alex found himself blinking in confusion as much as anything.

 

“You’d gone, Peter! I can’t believe I have to explain any more than that!”

 

“Um, guys?” Tom, gazing cautiously round the rough partition in the house made an uneasy ‘keep it down’ gesture.

 

“You’d gone!” Alex repeated, more slowly, keeping his voice low. He moved closer to where Peter was standing, arms crossed, in the corner of the dim, cramped half of a single-room, single-storey that was the best available lodging in the town on zero notice to three complete strangers.

 

The other half of the room, beyond the partition - the half with the front door in - had some itinerant trinket sellers, who did not appear to speak so much English as to be able to decode veiled references to time travel but might simply – and wisely – have been keeping themselves to themselves when faced with new and strange roommates.

 

“So we’d gone. So what?” Peter so close now, the breath of his words hot. “So you thought you ought to disappear too? Put yourself in danger? You _threw_ yourself into time, you just, what? Hoped?”

 

It was alarming to see Peter cross – that happened so rarely. Petulant, perhaps, or grumpy, not this ice-heat anger, eyes flashing, skin flushed.

 

“I wanted to help!” Alex argued. “You needed help, you idiot.”

 

“I’m not an idiot!” Peter spat back, with such ferocity that Alex found himself hearing the word, really hearing the word, in a way he hadn’t in years.

 

Tom gesticulated again, and Peter crowded closer. “I’m not the one who dislocated myself in time, heading God knows where, God knows when, as if when I turned up that would be the blindest bit of use!”

 

“I can help!”

 

“How? Peter was nearly shouting again, arms flung wide. “How is this helping?”

 

“It’s not like I could have asked you…”

 

“But even if you could have done, would you? Would you really?”

 

Alex stared at him.

 

“You don’t ask, you never ask.” Peter stepped back a bit now, and now his voice was quiet. “You just decide things, how you think things are, what you think I want, and you don’t _ask me_ …”

 

They were interrupted by a sudden flurry of sound from the other half of the room; a number of seemingly concerned utterances in a language Alex didn’t recognise, followed up with the familiar sound of Ruth politely but firmly insisting on doing things her way.

 

“No, no, I can manage just fine. No, thank you, but I’m quite alright.”

 

And then she was round the corner of the partition, several large faggots of twigs under one arm and a pitcher of something in the other. Her apron pocket was full and bulging – it looked like it might be cobnuts – and she had a large onion balanced in the top of the pitcher lip.

 

“Someone needs to get me some fat of some kind, if I’m to fry this nicely,” she announced. “I’m sure between you someone can do a day’s labour and buy me some scrag end of neck.”

 

“No need.” Alex, suddenly recalling, reached for his change purse. “I came prepared.”

 

Seeing the remaining groats, Ruth laughed. “Well I didn’t need to bargain so hard for all this in exchange for my kerchief, I dare say. But it’s all as well, I’m sure. Fine, I’ll head to the butcher before he closes and we’ll feast on dripping and maybe even an egg.”

 

“You don’t need to feed me,” Alex pointed out. “My dinner will be ready at the abbey at the usual…” alarmed, he moved so he could see around the partition to the doorway – still some light coming through, not yet too late, thank goodness, although he had to have been missed already.

 

“Oh no,” Peter had already started arranging a little cone of twigs to start the fire in the pit in the centre of their half of the floor. Now he stood up. “Alex, you’re not leaving until we figure this all out.”

 

“Peter,” Tom said gently, and put a hand on his shoulder. Which was reasonable enough and should not have made Alex feel even more agitated. “Peter, we’re not going to sort this out in one evening. And Ruth’s quite right, unless we get a move on we’ll not have any dinner – it all takes so much time like this, remember? Things will be clearer in the morning.”

 

“He made Ronald send him back!” Peter protested, turning to Tom but with a finger flung at Alex in accusation. “And he’s been here – God, he’s been here months, and it could have been worse, it could have been so much worse Alex…” and he’d turned again, eyes wide, face contorted. “Alex, you were lucky you got to the right time at all!”

 

“I don’t think so.” Ruth had been carrying a flint and steel in her costume anyway at the time of transchronolocation, because of course she had, and whilst the rest of them were talking she had got the fire lit. Now there was a bit more light in which they could see each other, although also the shabbiness of the room. Nothing that historical re-enactment could produce could ever manage the sheer _dungy-ness_ of the past, Alex reflected.

 

Now, wiping her hands on her apron, she stepped forward to join the rest of them in a kind of rough circle.

 

“I’ve been debating with myself whether to pipe up about this,” she said. “It’s hard sometimes, innit, to know when something’s just distracting if it’s not also useful. But if there’s going to be all these, erm, _robust discussions_ about who should have done what,” she cleared her throat. “Then it’s probably worth saying that I don’t think Alex happened to get the right year that we came back to. I don’t think he did follow our slipstream. I think we followed his.”

 

-

 

“Explain to me again,” Alex asked her. Tom had taken Peter off in search of frying fat and eggs, and Alex had joined Ruth in a trip to buy some pots for cooking and washing, with ever an eye on the setting sun and when he’d be expected back at the Abbey.

 

It was embarrassing, seeing Tom and Ruth so clearly engineering in common cause to keep him and Peter apart and from arguing.

 

Of all the things he was confused about, that might have been the worst and least explicable: _Why wasn’t Peter pleased to see him? Why was this so different to what he had pictured?_

 

In comparison to the unlikelihood of solving that, however, he’d take trying to understand the dynamics of spatio-temporal relocation.

 

Ruth stopped, putting down the earthenware bowl she was carrying. “I warn you, I am just reasoning this out from first principles, mind you.” She picked up some stones from the side of the road and placed them in a line.

 

“Look,” she said, and pointed at one stone. “That’s you leaving 2013. And here,” she put another stone to the left of it, “is you now.” And she marked a line between the two in the earth. Then she took another stone and put it between them, “This is me, Tom and Peter leaving 2013, before you, and here,” another stone, “is us arriving in the past, after you have.” She drew a line between those stones as well, shorter than the Alex line.

 

He stared at the stones, and then at her. He didn’t want it to be true – perhaps that was the problem? “I’m sorry Ruth, I still don’t understand.”

 

“Did you ever do chemistry at school? Balancing equations, does that ring a bell?”

 

Alex nodded slowly.

 

“It’s the same principle. It has to balance out. Not more on one side than on the other. You travelled from 2013 three weeks after we’d left, but in the past, you arrived here three months before we did, so by the time it’s 2013, in fact we have to leave first, even though we’re following you.”

 

“I still don’t think I see it.”

 

She sighed, and smiled. “When we’re back, I’ll give you a better course. It helps to have a chalkboard to hand when you’re trying to teach paradoxes. And string. And one of those spring slinky things.”

 

“Did Peter know this already?” Alex asked her, a sudden horrible thought striking. “Did he figure it out? Is that why he was so cross with me? Did he think that I…? That I purposefully…? Because truly Ruth I had no idea that what I did would actually…”

 

“Of course not. And besides it had already happened, and over four hundred years before you were born.” She saw his expression and laughed, picking up her bowl again. “Come on, come and join us for supper. Seems wrong for us all to be apart, when we’re only just all back together.”

 

He hesitated, “The abbey…”

 

“Won’t chuck you out over one night away. You’re not ordained, you’ve taken no vows.”

 

“But… Well, you saw.” He was blushing again, skin going hot and cold with shame. “I’m not sure Peter will want me there.”

 

She gave him a look that he couldn’t place, until he realised it was the same one Ron’s owl had worn, three months ago and about five centuries in the future.

 

Unimpressed.

 

“I just can’t,” he told her, “not tonight. I’ve got to go back. I’ll drop these at the door for you and then I’ll go. But I’ll be back when I can, I promise.”

 

“You did all this to see him,” Ruth observed. “So, you know, you might as well.”

 

It was entirely plausible, in Alex’s opinion, that he hadn’t heard her.

 

-

 

It was not until the day after the Feast of All Souls that Alex came into town again.

 

He had been waiting to have a reason to come. Part of his mind told him this was exactly how he had delayed visiting the Weald and Downland until it was far too late, but another part pointed out, all over again, that he couldn’t just…

 

In any case, for the great feast day the abbey kitchens had produced so many pommadore beef puddings that even the Abbot and his guests couldn’t put paid to it all, leaving some precious ends of meat and fat for wider distribution.

 

It turned out that in the twelve or so days since her arrival, Ruth had managed to secure work for herself, Tom and Peter, and was keeping them in decent food and surprisingly hygienic conditions. Alex cursed himself regularly now for not thinking to bring water purifying tablets or antiseptic gel – he could have smuggled them in somehow and the risk of dysentery, cholera and worse, to those living in a town, in shared accommodation, with only a latrine…

 

He felt guilty all over again for the relative comfort of his own position and circumstances.

 

“I could leave the place, I could, easily, any time,” he told Peter, as they stood together just outside and around the back of the house, sharpening the hand axes Peter and Tom were using in hedging and ditching work. The November weather was not hospitable nine days out of ten, and even now very chill unless one sat in direct sunshine. Alex had limited his work in the abbey gardens and he shivered just to think of Peter and Tom out all day in the open, maybe even in water…

 

Despite Alex’s fears, Peter hadn’t scolded him again in any subsequent meetings. Had in fact been perfectly courteous and agreeable – but then Peter was agreeable to everyone, nearly all the time, that was just how he treated people. Any people.

 

“I could come and join you here,” Alex said now. “I would.”

 

Peter threw down his whetstone with a sudden, crazy kind of roar that alarmed Alex so much he nearly cut himself on his own blade.

 

“Alex!” he cried out. “Alex, Alex, can’t you see..?”

 

“See what? What can’t I see? Bloody Hell, Peter.”

 

“Don’t say that!” Peter looked around them – no one was in earshot. “Do you want to be had up for blasphemy?” Then, sighing, he closed his eyes as if in pain.

 

“Alex, what good would you coming to the house with us do?”

 

“Well then I wouldn’t be off having a nice time with my straw ticking mattress in the Abbey whilst you…”

 

“And would we be better off?”

 

“Pardon?”

 

“Would your sacrifice make us better off? Or would it just stop you feeling guilty?”

 

Alex stared at him.

 

“This is like you coming here, Alex” Peter told him. He’d dropped his voice, cautious, whispering, and it made him sound like he was speaking through pain. “It didn’t help us. It wouldn’t help us. It just made you suffer with us, stopped you having to feel – I don’t know, whatever it is you feel about leaving, whatever strange guilt and responsibility you have for us.”

 

It was horrible. Alex felt cold and then hot and then cold again. Sick.

 

Sick, and stuck here, and with nothing that could be done about it.

 

“I know,” he heard himself say.

 

Peter’s eyes widened.

 

“I know,” Alex repeated. “I know that this wasn’t a sensible decision. I know it doesn’t help and I know it wasn’t made for the right reasons. I’ve had a lot of time to think since I’ve been here.”

 

“Three and a half months!” Peter repeated, but under his breath. Suddenly he stopped, sliding down against the wall to sit on the ground as if all his strength had suddenly gone. “Alex, you could have been here years!”

 

Alex looked down at him for a moment, and then found himself descending too, sitting down on the cold earth and letting himself press into Peter’s warmth. He buried his face in the side of Peter’s shoulder, the lovely, earthy Peter smell of him coming up through the weave of the lustrous blue fabric.

 

“I missed you,” Alex said, into the cloth. “Even before any of this. I…” He made himself look up, meet Peter’s eyes.

 

“It was you,” he tried to explain. “When I didn’t know what I wanted. It was you. Only I couldn’t see it. I dug and I dug and I just… I couldn’t see it.”

 

“All I wanted was for you to be happy,” Peter told him, softly.

 

Alex kissed him.

 

Sudden and warm, lips pressed together, the scent of Peter even stronger, wet and slick and Alex’s skin was prickling with heat all over again, but good, sweet now, rushing, and…

 

And then a man called out, some apprentice calling to another in the street on the other side of the house, and Alex remembered that they were out, in broad daylight, in a privacy that could shatter with someone turning a corner, in a world where even saying ‘Hell’ would be quite enough to get you the wrong end of the stocks.


	4. Chapter 4

 

“But when was it with you? When did you… you know, realise?”

 

“I can’t pin it down,” Peter sighed, sounding just a little distracted. He was breathing somewhat harder than usual. “Really, I can’t… it came up on me slowly, I suppose, I…” He gave up the fight to pursue the end of the sentence, and rested his forehead in the curve of Alex’s neck. The air between them seemed very warm.

 

Alex closed his eyes and clenched his hands into fists at his sides: _No more._

 

No more than this could he allow himself, because if he let himself reach out and touch Peter now, even just to hug him or caress those lovely greying curls, it wouldn’t end. Not until he’d exhausted every possible way to bring them as close as possible.

 

They were sitting, as had become their habit, in the corner of Ruth, Tom and Peter’s half of the rented room. The peddlers had moved on, no new tenants had arrived and this morning Tom and Ruth were both out – for now, the space afforded a possibly deceptive semi-privacy.

 

Peter had made some rough three-legged stools, with timber ends and short, stout sticks gleaned from the forest, and so now both of them were off the ground as they sat, side by side, thigh to thigh, so near and yet not half near enough.

 

It was now so cold outside that the central fire in the room had to be maintained despite the terrible effect on the air quality, so that Alex supposed he and Peter could explain sitting so close, so nearly entangled, as merely heat conservation if it came to that.

 

The fire and the sight glow of a rush light, and the hint of a brown November day coming round the partition, were all the available illumination anyway, and so were someone to burst in they could scarcely be sure of seeing anything incriminating.

 

But that would only excuse so much, conceal only up to a point.

 

And so Alex clenched his fists and did not stroke Peter’s shoulders or back or touch him at all.

 

Their caresses could only, must only, be with words.

 

“I remember from the first time we met,” Alex began again, “and I saw you and I just… I didn’t know what it was I was feeling, I suppose, but…”

 

This ground had been covered before in their talks together. They had spent hours, over the past few days that Alex had been able to visit, running over memories and reorienting to each other’s viewpoint.

 

Apart, alone, more able to think, at work in the abbey garden with his hoe and rake, Alex took the conversations and examined them in his mind. As a historian he’d always known that there were two versions of every event but he’d never had reason to feel it before, to have something so personal re-presented to him in an entirely new light.

 

“And if only I’d said something…” Alex said now, and gave in to the impulse to kiss, dry and quick, at the side of Peter’s cheek. “But honestly I didn’t know what it was that I wanted, only that I… And being around you was frustrating me and I couldn’t… I couldn’t _see_ …” His voice cracked a little. It was partly the hoarseness of hours spent aching with want, and partly something else.

 

Peter made a sound of pain, and then Peter was touching him, cradling Alex’s face in his hands, searching for his mouth, dropping kisses to his skin again and again.

 

He wasn’t saying anything, and Alex couldn’t manage to either, not even _stop_ , or _this isn’t safe_ or _we can’t_.

 

Peter groaned again, low this time, half into Alex’s open, seeking mouth. Alex felt the hot rush of air as if it had touched his skin everywhere, in every inch of him. In some places in particular, hotter and harder and waiting and wanting.

 

“Knock, knock!”

 

It was Ruth’s voice, at the front door in the other half of the room. She allowed a very generous and frankly unlikely amount of time to get from there to the partition opening and emerge into their view – and her own, of them. She was carrying a full jug of water and what looked like a small cheese.

 

Tom followed shortly behind, looking slightly sheepish although the low light was forgiving of everyone’s expression equally – or so Alex prayed, with a side note to any Almighty Presence to thank them for giving him his life’s greatest clandestine sexual awakening in an area with very, very baggy trousers.

 

“Sun’s getting down, Alex – you’ll need to be back the Abbey soon,” Ruth observed, not unkindly. She knew, of course – she’d taken one look at them, when they’d come hastily and shakily inside after that first kiss, and started cackling with laughter and – apparently – relief, and then had conveyed the news to Tom with a devilish use of hand gestures, possibly in case walls had ears but also quite possibly simply because it was Ruth.

 

She also knew, better than any of them, what kind of danger two men trying to court each other in Tudor England could get into.

 

So, “Abbey time-keeping, huh,” was all Alex said to her, letting his annoyance and frustration find another target. “How many decades is it until an hour is sixty minutes long regardless of the time of year?”

 

“Now, now, it’s a beautiful and elegant system of measurement,” Peter intoned. “Tom and I did a whole thing about it, adjustable clocks and all.”

 

“We did indeed,” Tom agreed, and then coughed.

 

“I’ll give you adjustable clocks,” Alex muttered darkly, but shook it off and asked Tom some pertinent archaeological questions, glad to try and occupy his mind with the minutiae of cogs and ratchets.

 

He and Tom had had a brief, deeply awkward conversation the week before in which Alex had tried to explain that his issues were his issues, not Tom’s and not with Tom. He could only hope that his very genuine sincerity had been apparent.

 

“Speaking of time,” Tom added now, brightening, “It’s nearly five weeks since the three of us came through, by my calendar – so we’re likely to be sucked home again in the next seven days or so, am I right?”

 

“That’s in line with what the briefing folder said,” Peter agreed. He was standing such a long way away now, and Alex’s body seemed to be aware of that with every fibre.

 

But it wasn’t just that which left Alex feeling uneasy.

 

He looked at Ruth, who was busy by the fire not being involved in the conversation, and said nothing.

 

-

 

The air outside was cleaner than anything you could find in the twenty-first century, anywhere on the planet, and the air inside any given domestic building was foul.

 

The food was more eco-friendly and vastly less processed and considerably more likely to give you botulism. Also, Alex had to keep eating weeds Ruth harvested at the roadside to avoid scurvy.

 

He was invigorated by outdoor work, and his back ached for anti-inflammatories.

 

He was in love, gloriously and fully and in a way he could never have imagined, and if anyone beyond their tiny circle found out he would be lucky if a whipping was all that was done to him.

 

He had travelled here, and so had Peter, and they had found each other.

 

But what guarantee was there, really, that whatever process had united them would not just as easily split them apart?

 

What guarantee was there that any of them would ever go home?

 

Further days passed, the coming of December marked by the First Sunday in Advent. On Monday, Alex went down to the town only to find the house empty, the fire dead in the central hearth, no sign of anyone at all.

 

Tom came back first – there’d been an explosion and then a fire at the flour mill, all able bodied men in the town called to run and help and pass the chain of buckets, and Ruth had dashed off with her salves to join them, except she now wanted some more aloe vera, which Tom had come back to get and did Alex know which…

 

“Oh fuck,” Tom said suddenly, pausing mid-flow, when he really looked at Alex’s face. “Oh holy shit, you thought… You thought we’d just gone.”

  
Breathing ragged, panic still in his blood, Alex sank to sit on one of Peter’s stools. He’d only started crying with relief, until then it had been a blank, worse than awful.

 

“We wouldn’t, Alex…” Tom began and then stopped, perhaps for the first time realising what Alex had weeks earlier - that they might not have a choice.

 

“Don’t tell him about all this.” Alex said to Tom. “It’ll only make him feel guilty and it’s not his fault. And I bet he did more than his bit at the fire too.”

 

“He doesn’t have any eyebrows,” Tom admitted, sighing, and then laughed a little. “But yes, he saved at least one man’s life I think.”

 

“He would.”

 

Tom came and sat on the other stool. For a moment he appeared to hesitate, then he cleared his throat.

 

“Listen, Alex. I like both of you a lot, OK? And I couldn’t think of anyone better for either of you than each other. I just wanted to say I’m so happy for you guys.”

 

Alex found he couldn’t quite speak, but he nodded, feeling the helpless grin he got whenever he thought about himself and Peter as a thing, as a ‘together’, spread over his face. At last, the tightness in his chest, which had started when he’d walked into the empty room, was easing.

 

“And I do think maybe you should move in, into the other half. Here I mean.” Tom frowned, gesturing beyond the partition. “I mean, it’s got to be plausible that there’s a proximity factor in co-travelling back, right? And it really should be happening soon. I mean, surely you’d come with us anyway? We’re all a linked bunch, just like Beard and colleagues and that whole Pompeii thing. But it might be as well to be sure. After all, it is likely to be any day now.”

 

“We’ve all certainly been here long enough,” Alex agreed with him, trying to ignore the anxious chill creeping back over him.

 

-

 

Alex was out of the abbey and into the tiny, damp, smoky house by Christmas. Ruth had saved up for a handful of raisins and just enough meat for a few mouthfuls each, and Peter had whittled a simple penny whistle, enough for Alex to sing George Formby to, (‘When I’m Cleaning Windows’, as Peter argued, not containing anything that would, per se, constitute a temporal incongruity to a Tudor mind).

 

Tom had done some work for a rich visitor at the inn which had resulted – he revealed in a great flourish – in being gifted a marzipan star which was mostly not hardened yet, and divided carefully four ways was still a wonderful moment of sweetness. “Yes, I was actually kind of hoping we’d be here long enough to enjoy it,” he remarked, with determined cheer. “I mean, when we’re home again we’ll have our own body weight in sugar on our doorsteps again, it won’t be the same.”

 

Then it was Twelfth Night.

 

By mid-January, Tom had stopped mentioning how soon they were likely to go home. The three late arrivals had now been in Tudor England nearly ten weeks. Alex was entering his sixth month.

 

It was both better and worse to be living in the same room as Peter - and Ruth, and Tom. Now Alex could sleep once again – or not - to the familiar sound of Peter’s snoring, as in so many shared rooms and lodgings over the years. Now he could wake every morning and know that Peter was there, safe and not vanished. They could chat and press close almost whenever they liked.

 

And they could do nothing else. Dare not. Must not.

 

Didn’t want to, not really, not here in the dark and the dirt, with an ear always to the door and danger not only to themselves but very possibly to Ruth and Tom as well. Not half-hidden and ashamed in the cold, not somewhere where it was so difficult to wash.

 

“What if it was like this always?” Alex asked Peter finally, helplessly, in one of their more private afternoons together, walking out at the town boundary in frosty air as they collected firewood. “What if this is it now, for the rest of our lives? What should we do?”

 

He had been mulling it over in his head for a while. They could leave this town, of course. Strike out to somewhere more rural, more secret, more safe. Or go into London, find the places where men like them had always gathered, somewhere to try and build half a life. But what about Ruth and Tom? Leaving them was unthinkable, and yet dragging them elsewhere seemed desperately unfair if there was even a chance that leaving the place where they had originally relocated in time would negatively affect their chances of getting back again.

 

Having cast a watchful look about them first, Peter drew Alex into a tight hug, close up and warm against his wide chest. Alex clung to him, fingers digging into his sleeves, and let himself be rocked.

 

“I don’t know, Peter,” Alex confessed, face buried in Peter’s shoulder. “I just don’t know.”

 

“You know _this_ ,” Peter told him, and squeezed him yet more tightly. “You know this now. For always. For sure.”

 

“Bloody hell I want to shag you,” Alex wept out, somewhere between a laugh and a sob, and Peter met him with what was probably much the same expression Alex himself had, somewhere between agony and the giggles and divine, intense fondness. Peter kissed him quick and fast and not half enough.

 

-

 

February and Sussex Abbey decided to distribute a charitable and pious gift of high quality beeswax candles to those attending service for Candlemas, leading to a delighted Ruth leading the procession back to the house for lunch, her trophies clacking in her apron pocket.

 

“We can eat the dripping I was going to make the new rush lights from!” she was pointing out. “I could fry something – several somethings! I can’t wait. Maybe even today, now. Maybe an egg. Ooh, couldn’t you just go for an egg?”

 

Alex was conscious that the rest of them were far more subdued. Tom had become very quiet of late, given to wandering off alone. And as for himself and Peter, the agony of choice had not abated, only become more confusing as each day here seemed to reduce the chance they would have many choices at all.

 

As they got back to the house, however, Ruth’s stream of chatter suddenly slowed.

 

Alex looked up.

 

There was a woman standing in their doorway, leaning on the frame. Quite tall, in a red dress and white apron and wearing an oddly familiar brown statute cap.

 

“Seriously Mum,” the woman called out to them, “you could have at least put up some curtains!”

 

And then Ruth was running to her, and Eve was letting herself be swept up and twirled around and they were both laughing and laughing.

 

-

 

“Ron told me what had happened,” Eve said. They were eating a lunch of pottage, made newly exciting with some stock cubes Eve had thought to bring, alongside vitamin pills, water purifying tablets and blessed, blessed paracetamol. Alex’s back felt as comfortable as it had in weeks.

 

Nonetheless now he stiffened. “Ah. Did he now.”

 

“Yup.” Eve put down her spoon. “You really should have made a Worsley calculation to pinpoint your destination at the very least. You could have really gone centuries either way!”

 

Conscious of the look on Peter’s face, Alex cleared his throat. “I uh… didn’t know about those?”

 

Eve shrugged her shoulders. “It’s pretty new to be fair. I’ve been studying them as part of my internship with… well, the point is this is a fast-moving field and you do need an expert. If this happens again, call me first. Ron’s not even really supposed to have that gadget.”

 

“Noted,” Alex said, slightly dazed.

 

“Anyway,” Eve continued, “I did do some calculations and I could see before the computer even processed it that the best thing would be for me to come through myself. Then it was just getting that approved. They have some exception clause for lost family members which I think is meant to avoid paradox creation but honestly it _could_ apply here and they couldn’t prove otherwise, so…”

 

“So, not to put too fine a point on it,” Tom sat back from the table, folding his arms. “Can you get us home now?”

 

Eve drew in a deep breath through her nostrils, setting down her spoon. “Sort of?”

 

He leant in again, frowning. “How ‘sort of’? What’s the problem?”

 

She made another noise of the kind you wouldn’t be keen to hear from a plumber contemplating your U-bend, Alex thought, let alone a renegade time traveller who might be your only hope of rescue from the fifteenth century.

 

“Well,” Eve began. “I’ve got the charts with me if you want to see them, but they are quite complicated. Essentially the problem is the way that you all ended up here. Alex and then you lot, but Alex trying to chase you lot, so that he left after but arrived sooner, and the closed loop of cause and effect that that probably created. You see, there’s got to be balance in the system, like…”

 

“Like a chemical equation,” Alex finished and shot a glance at Ruth. Had she known about whatever this issue was all along? Known and being living with it without anyone to talk to?

 

“Exactly.” Eve steepled her fingers and looked at each of them, one after the other.

 

“It wasn’t Alex’s fault,” Peter told her. Alex reached for his hand, squeezing it gratefully.

 

“Well, yeah, it’s a cause and effect loop, it’s impossible to unpick whodunnit,” Eve laughed a bit, like one might explaining something to a child. “But it creates a situation where… well, I know what way I think is the most likely to get everyone home, but I’m not sure you’re going to like it.”

 

“Go for it,” Ruth said encouragingly. She had barely stopped looking at her daughter since she’d arrived. Alex could have kicked himself for allowing her to get away with pretending this time stuck here hadn’t been worrying her as much as any of them.

 

“Well, OK.” Eve picked up four nuts from the bowl, and put them out in a row on the table. Then, she took one of them away into her hand. “For a start, I’m pretty sure you’ll have to travel separately. One group of three, and one alone.”

 

“What?” Peter’s hold on Alex’s hand had tightened.

 

“One to come back with me, using my device,” Eve confirmed. “And the three others follow in that wake soon after. And I think the best case scenario for that working would mean the one who comes with me would be Alex.”

 

“No!” Alex stood up. “Absolutely not, let me stop you right there.”

 

“Can’t you bring us all?” asked Tom.

 

She shook her head. “Given the situation, like I say, and the issues of balance, I think that would be extremely risky. There’s a good chance we’d leave someone behind, and if that did happen then that person would almost certainly be stuck.”

 

“But you could come back and get them, surely?”

 

“It’s not like a bicycle, it’s not… you can’t just go to and fro, you can’t pinpoint your destination like that. The timeline has ways of throwing you out, throwing you off, and unless you respect the ways it works it doesn’t matter how good your kit is. I mean maybe one day, there’s a department at Oxford doing their best, but I think this is just one of those things that you can’t unpick. The first and second law of thermodynamics, that level of essential.”

 

Alex was still holding Peter’s hand; he let himself be pulled to sit down again, Peter’s arm going round him, blunt comfort. He tried to remember to breathe. “Listen Eve, are you sure about this? Did you double check?”

 

“Honestly? If I had the choice I would probably pick my mother as the one to come back with me, so yes, triple checked actually.”

 

“Sorry,” Alex sighed. “I apologise, that was stupid of me.”

 

“It’s OK. I know it’s a lot to take.”

 

“It is.” Alex looked at the others, his tone becoming apologetic. “I mean I can’t possibly…” he stopped. Peter was staring back at him, an unreadable expression on his face.

 

“The other thing to bear in mind is your grouping, your linking factor.” Eve put one nut back on the table, still a distance from the other three. “Full disclosure, if I try to take you all, then I’m pretty sure Mum, Peter and Tom would stay clumped and stay with me. It would very likely be Alex who was left. At the same time, if I do try to take just one of the others, the contingencies get… messy.”

 

Alex looked again at Peter and bit his lip. “So you’re saying you could almost certainly rescue everyone, providing I stayed behind?”

 

“That wouldn’t _be_ everyone!” Peter barked and stood up. He gazed at Alex another long, imploring moment, then turned on his heel and started walking.

 

There was carefully muted worry on Ruth’s face, tension and fear on Tom’s, exasperation on Eve’s. But all of them gestured quickly at Alex to follow.

 

-

 

 

The idea of leaving Peter, even for a second, was a kind of a pain that Alex had not imagined being able to feel. He’d always been self-sufficient, in his life, and proud of it.

 

This was… the only thing this was like…

 

…was the way he’d felt when he’d left the show. Alex allowed himself to roll his eyes at his own stupidity

 

But even then when he’d been pining, all unawares… well the point had been that he wasn’t aware of it. He’d never consciously tried to step away from anything that meant half so much.

 

Peter was making his way out of the town and towards the woods. He had to be aware of Alex close behind, but he didn’t stop and nor did he turn. Which meant they needed a conversation of the kind that no one else should be allowed to hear.

 

Alex’s heart was pounding.

 

Now that there was a true possibility of leaving, he found himself noticing once more aspects of the landscape that he’d started to take for granted; the peace, the birdsong, the quality of the air.

 

He could have lived here, he knew that. If it had come to that – if it did come to that – he’d stay, he’d find things to celebrate.

 

But it would have been so different, with Peter at his side. And for a while there he’d really thought it was something he was going to have.

  
They could have joined the navy. They could have journeyed on the silk road. They could have built a farm, somewhere no one would find, somewhere where the work of two sets of hands would yield everything anyone could need…

 

They had reached the top of a slight rise that brought them to the wood’s edge. Peter turned to stare back behind them and Alex went to his side.

 

There was the town below. There, right there – one could pick out the roof, there were only so many buildings – were Ruth, Eve and Tom awaiting an answer.

 

“She might be wrong,” Peter said, not much as if he believed it. “And she didn’t say it was the only way.”

 

“Just the best one,” Alex moved closer, slipped his hand into Peter’s. Peter’s skin was rougher than it had ever been before, and the creases and cracks in his palm black with dirt.

 

“You said, in there…” Peter began, prompting.

 

And there were so many things Alex wanted to say. Protestations, promises, insistences. Words about what he couldn’t live without, what he couldn’t bear to do. About what was needed, about what the next steps ought to be.

 

“Well,” Alex said, and then stopped, breathing. “Well, Peter,” he said slowly. “What do you want us to do?”

 

Peter’s eyes softened. Slowly, he leaned in for a kiss. Alex swallowed hard, meeting him. His chest hurt. Hurt horribly, right under his sternum.

 

“I want you to be safe,” Peter murmured. “That’s what I need. More than anything.” He nosed under Alex’s ear, so terribly, terribly gentle. “And I know you don’t want to hear that, I know you don’t want to leave us behind, but I’d rather know you were safe and I need you give me that, please.”

 

Alex was shaking. He felt his breath hitch. “Only because I love you,” he choked out, and kissed Peter hard, deep, before he could say anything to make it hurt even worse.

 

-

 

Alex was holding Eve’s hand and following her. Following her through. Following her through time and space and out again, and the first, awful, impression was that it was too warm, far too warm, and all had gone awry yet again.

 

“Twenty five degrees in October,” Eve observed, smiling. “That’s what an Industrial Revolution will do for you.”

 

“October?”

 

“October 2013, four hours after you hijacked poor old Ron.” Eve inclined her head, and there indeed was the professor, sitting on a picnic bench, a battered knapsack cradled in his arms. “I went through,” she checked something on her wrist, “about ten minutes ago.”

 

“Wow.” And Alex was impressed, truly. But he knew the words rang a little hollow.

 

The air had changed. There was a chemical tang to it that he had almost forgotten could exist.

 

He felt strangely naked, somehow helpless. Aware of something missing.

 

They’d not paused for goodbyes, the other side. Nothing lengthy. And Alex had been glad, because with much more thinking he never could have gone through with it, no matter what his good intentions to let Peter decide, for once, how things would be.

 

“I’m sorry I got us into all this mess,” Alex found himself saying. “I didn’t think.”

 

“I told you before, it’s a loop, it’s no one’s fault,” Eve had left a backpack behind a bin. She went and got it, opening a plastic water flask and guzzling the contents. “Besides, people don’t think, not in your situation.”

 

“And how long will it be, do you reckon?” Alex glanced back at the patch of ground where they’d just come through. “I don’t have anything much on, I can come daily if you need – or we can split shifts, I know you’ll be worried too.”

 

“If it’s going to work at all…” Eve began.

  
And before Alex’s heart could even quite finish dropping to his stomach over the conditional, she had interrupted herself with a happy shout that finally made her sound like a woman barely out of her teens.

 

“Mum!” she called out gleefully.

 

There they were, all three of them, smiling in the sunshine.

 

The patrons of the Weald and Downland had obviously come expecting to see enthusiastic people in Tudor costume larking about, and if any of them hadn’t really banked on two men embracing like they’d been lost and found and lost all over again, certainly Alex had no time to notice.


	5. Epilogue

“You might as well,” Peter said, and further pressed his case with a very specific movement of his hand where it was trapped between them.

 

Alex, his back to the wall, sweating, panting, clenched his teeth and felt his toes curl in pleasure.

 

“I dunno, Peter… _Peter_ …” gasping, he licked his lips to try and wet them. His hands clutched for dear life at the coat hooks either side of his head. He was trying to hold out, trying to ride the wave of sensation on this peak forever.

 

“You don’t need to worry,” said Peter sweetly. “Victorians thatch plenty, there’s opium and nice clean boiled water in tea and if the worst came to the worst we could always move to France and live under the Code Napoleon.”

 

“Yes with your impeccable 1870s French, of c-course.” Alex caught his breath again. Peter had both hands at work on him and it was hard to think of anything else. Hard to think why he’d vaguely intended to turn down the production team’s offer, distant worries about shooting schedules and lack of writing time and, well maybe, yes, just a little, the idea of being flung pell mell through the past, all fading compared the way Peter was making him feel.

 

“Shee-eep,” Peter carolled sweetly, pressing himself closer. He was still fully clothed, Alex stripped bare, they had only recently discovered how _interesting_ this was. “They totally moved sheep on the railways. Also we could go down a mine again.” He started a slow, regular motion of his fingers.

 

Alex wondered if he could wrench the hooks clean off the wall. Which would be a shame, given how long they’d spent doing up the cottage, lovingly restoring, plastering, limewashing and painting with the greatest attention to detail.

 

They’d had time, after their return to the Weald and Downland, to get things right at long last. Peter, Ruth and Tom had finished up the _Tudor Monastery Farm_ series – and a Christmas special to boot – and Alex had returned to his book finding the words flowing for the first time.

 

At weekends and on long visits, then and since, he and Peter flowed together almost as easily. Alex didn’t always remember to ask before making assumptions, and Peter didn’t always remember that Alex needed help, still, with believing himself to be wanted, but they were getting better, no doubt about that.

 

One foot in front of the other. Practice makes perfect.

 

And damn near perfect Peter definitely was. Alex moaned again, his whole body tensing, and again, feeling his stomach muscles tighten and twitch, as Peter dropped to his knees before him.

 

After Guédelon Castle, after that separation (fortunately only spatial rather than temporal, although it had taken six months of time away from them in the usual way), moving in together had been as natural as Peter coming to stay and never quite leaving, until Alex had pointed out that Peter put enough sweat and blood into the place to call it his own too, an awkward sort of a proposal perhaps, and all out of order, but Peter had seemed to like it.

 

“Also,” Peter added now, drawing back and freeing his mouth at rather a critical juncture – Alex fairly whined at him. “Also, there’ll be Ruth’s cooking. Ruth’s roast pork. Ruth’s puddings, Alex.”

 

“Fine, fine, if you like,” Alex spread his legs a little wider, shamelessly inviting. “I suppose it would be fun, this, whatever the hell it is. Now _please_ , Peter.”

 

“Full Steam Ahead,” Peter quipped, one eyebrow raised in devilry, and dropped a kiss to Alex’s inner thigh, and went to his task with a grin.


End file.
